By Eric Eisenberg
Grifters. Matchstick Men. Con artists. Cinema has a long and strong history with these suave, suit-wearing swindlers. Despite the large numbers, almost every film within this sub-genre follows the same formula: a team of confidence men get together for one last score before retirement. One of the members will protest, citing either riskiness or immorality, but will drop the argument quickly as the leader explains it away. The mark is picked, the dumber and richer the better, and with the audience only half-cued into the plot, twists and turns galore hamper and help the bilkers until the final twist arrives, squeezing the anti-heroes out of one final jam.
With all of this repetition, however, what makes the audience come back for more of the same story? The answer is simple: the film’s ability to make the audience question everything they see until they don’t know their left from right.
So enters “The Brothers Bloom” into the hustler genus. The sophomore effort from writer/director Rian Johnson, whose previous film, “Brick,” was a critically lauded reimagining of film noir, “Bloom” has the snap and crackle that he exhibited in his first film, but also some strangely placed pops along the way.
The film follows the tried-and-true plot structure mentioned above as two orphan brothers, the outgoing plan-maker Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and the reserved and withheld Bloom (Adrian Brody) plan to bamboozle an eccentric heiress (Rachel Weisz). Paired with a silent explosions expert (Rinko Kikuchi) and a Belgian curator (Robbie Coltrane), the group begins a world-wide adventure to raise some bank accounts while lowering others.
Stealing nearly every scene is Weisz as the hobby collecting heiress. While juggling chainsaws, break dancing and performing card tricks, Weisz always maintains and exerts a child-like quirkiness. As she continues to crash multiple orange Lamborghinis throughout the film, the audience simply giggles as her driving skills match her maturity level: somewhere around age ten. The Oscar winning Weisz, who learned to play multiple instruments, do karate, play Ping-Pong, unicycle, skateboard, and many other skills for the role, just seems to have fun with the character and the audience understands Bloom’s pain as he tries to stop himself from falling in love with her.
While two films is hardly enough to fully grasp a director’s sense of style and mise en scène, Johnson seems most influenced by Wes Anderson, both in character development and cinematography (making ample use of tracking shots), and Paul Thomas Anderson, who even goes so far as to have Ricky Jay perform the voice-over narration in the beginning of the film, reminiscent of Jay’s work in Anderson’s “Magnolia.” While the influence is notable, the film does have its own individual style, often having as much going on in the background as in the front (such as Kikuchi, playing the aptly named Bang Bang, shooting down a tree with a handgun.)
The film’s largest weakness comes from its title character. Playing a character similar in attitude to his role in “The Darjeeling Limited,” Brody is often simply middle-gazing, never showing the emotional range needed for a character who has realized that his life is nothing more than a story written by his brother. Be it sitting next to his former mentor turned threatening enemy or quickly exiting a train car after Penelope exclaims her “horniness,” Brody is never in the moment and doesn’t seem to care.
So now, the answer to the posed determinate: how much is the audience given and how long are the lights kept off? Simply, rather than having a feeling of confusion, the film seems to make the audience self-aware and feel that what they are watching is not the whole truth. While this feeling is rewarded when the question is answered and the film starts down a positive path, or what is thought to be fiction turns out to be truth, too often the audience is let down when a twist loses it’s surprise.
The film is worth seeing for Weisz and Kikuchi’s performances alone, but as a film about flimflammers, the story does not offer enough new to balance out the old.
© Eric Eisenberg, All Rights Reserved